Telos launches a rocket. Alois launches a relationship. … Not like that though, get out of the gutter. For shame.

The clock read -00:30:37.

The meteorologists had said that the weather would hold. The head scientists from each department gathered around a station full of radars transmitting the telemetries of the various fronts that surrounded them; the silent pulses of disseminated information forced machines to print their assessments in convoluted points of data upon long, scroll-like rolls of narrow paper. Wind speed, direction, movement, probability of rain--all forces of nature were evaluated and reduced to a universally understood form: mathematics.

Toska Rickard, an Expressionist doctor, manages to get through dinner with her father Nicolas Rickard, the Director of the Bourbaki Institute.

The sound of applause echoing through the auditorium was as familiar as it was irrelevant.

Like most things in Nicolas' life, his incumbent speech welcoming the latest group of exceptional young minds to the Bourbaki Institute had been a foregone conclusion, written long before and forgotten immediately after. It was not recycled, as many expected, nor was it canned. In fact, it was surprisingly genuine; he had said precisely what he meant and meant precisely what he said. Everyone accepted to the Institute was accustomed to being the smartest person in the room, their class, their school. It was only natural for them to assume it would be the same here, and it was literally Director Rickard's job to inform them that it was not.

His speech had been a precisely balanced affair, equal parts congratulatory and cautionary. They had done well to come so far, he had told them in no uncertain terms. For all intents and purposes a matriculation at the Institute guaranteed not only success but insight, an opportunity to witness and understand the greater machinations of a grander world.

Many of them, he had made clear, would never take advantage of that opportunity.